Tinker v. Des Moines School District (1969)

Case Summary

In 1965, John Tinker, his sister Mary Beth, and a friend were
sent home from school for wearing black armbands to protest the
Vietnam War. The school had established a policy permitting students
to wear several political symbols, but had excluded the wearing of
armbands protesting the Vietnam War. Their fathers sued, but the
District Court ruled that the school had not violated the
Constitution. The Court of Appeals agreed with the lower court, and
the Tinkers appealed to the Supreme Court.

The Court's Decision

In a 7-2 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the students had
the right to wear armbands to school to protest the Vietnam
War. Justice Abe Fortas wrote for the majority. He first emphasized
that students have First Amendment rights: “It can hardly be
argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional
rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse
gate.” While schools certainly have the right to establish rules
relating to “the length of skirts or the type of clothing, to
hair style,…[or] aggressive, disruptive action or even group
demonstrations,” this case does not involve any of those
issues. “The school officials banned and sought to punish
petitioners for a silent, passive expression of opinion, unaccompanied
by any disorder or disturbance on the part of petitioners. There is
here no evidence whatever of petitioners' interference, …with the
schools' work or of collision with the rights of other students to be
secure and to be let alone. Accordingly, this case does not concern
speech or action that intrudes upon the work of the schools or the
rights of other students.”

Justice Hugo Black dissented. He pointed out that the case
involved a small number of students who refused to obey the
instructions of school officials, and argued that allowing this
behavior would have a negative effect on schools and on the country as
a whole.

More on the Case

Mary Beth Tinker eventually became a nurse and worked with the
Veterans Administration. She later wrote that it was “a
privilege to work with our veterans who had sacrificed part of their
lives.… I work with a lot of paraplegics and quadriplegics, and some
of them were injured in the Vietnam War… So I don't have any regrets
about it at all. I'm proud to have been a part of anything that
stopped the war.”

The Supreme Court has dealt with other school cases since
Tinker. In Bethel School District
No. 403 v. Fraser, 1986, the Court
held that a high school student did not have the right under the First
Amendment to use indecent language and sexual metaphors in a speech at
a school assembly.

In Hazelwood School District
v. Kuhlmeier, 1988, the Court ruled that school
officials could regulate the content of the student newspaper in any
reasonable way. The principal had deleted student articles about teen
pregnancy and about the impact of parental divorce on students at the
school. In both Fraser and
Kuhlmeier, the Court emphasized that students in
public schools do not always have the same First Amendment rights as
adults in other settings.